51% of Tory members are open to 'troop surge'

The December survey of ConservativeHome readers revealed the smallest possible majority in favour of sending extra British and American troops to Iraq if they could bring peace. Last week David Cameron had agreed that extra US troops might be the right approach. Later today George W Bush is expected to announce a 'surge' in US troop deployments of 20,000. He has finally decided to step away from the 'light footprint' approach - favoured by Donald Rumsfeld but, unfortunately, there are only likely to be 20,000 extra pairs of feet and not the 50,000 increase many think necessary.

In his new book America Alone, Mark Steyn argues that a premmature withdrawal will be deadly for the global authority of the United States:

"Visitors to America often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan usually found below a bold Stars and Stripes: "These Colors Don't Run." To non-Americans it can seem a trifle touchy. But for a quarter of a century the presumption of the country's enemies was that those colors did run - they ran from Vietnam, they ran from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, they ran from Somalia. Even the successful campaigns - the inconclusively concluded 1991 Gulf War and the air-only 1999 Kosovo war - seemed manifestly designed to avoid putting those colors in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, those colors ran from the African embassy bombings and the Khobar towers, just as Zarqawi figured those colors would run from the Sunni Triangle. Being seen not to run - or, if you prefer, being seen to show "resolve" - should be the indispensable objective of US froreign policy. Were these colors to run from Iraq, it would be the end of the American era - for why would Russia, China or even Belgium ever again take seriously a superpower that runs screaming for home at the first pinprick?"

ConservativeHome fully the supports the idea of an increase in troop deployments in Iraq and has been advocating an increase since November 2005. There must be a real danger that George W Bush's surge of 20,000 is too little, too late, however. Most of the advocates of a surge think that at least 30,000 troops and probably 50,000 extra soldiers are needed to execute the clear-and-control operations that are necessary to bring order to Baghdad and hunt down the insurgents that operate from the Anbar province. President Bush will only get this one chance to correct the mistakes of his Iraq policy. He won't get another opportunity to announce extra troop deployments - he should announce one large and sustained surge today.

It is also important that there are other changes to strategy in Iraq. The Iraqi government must make it clear that any insurgents arrested by coalition troops will be detained and prosecuted. There have been too many examples of the Iraqi government acting in a sectarian way - releasing ideological or religious allies. Faster approval of reconstruction spending and more active attempts to stop insurgents crossing the Iranian and Syrian borders are also vital. For more ideas see this in the Wall Street Journal and this from Victor Davis Hanson.

As I argued on 18 Doughty Street's Worldview programme (due for broadcast at 8.30pm tomorrow) it is difficult to hope for any progress in the world's major troublespots so long as America is weak or is perceived as weak. Libya voluntarily abandoned its WMD programme and Syria withdrew from Lebanon in that brief window after the fall of Saddam when America was perceived as strong. The world's least attractive regimes have become increasingly assertive in rough proportion to America's decreased resolve in Iraq. Democrat and popular opposition to extra troops looks likely to mean Bush's necessary change of course will be inadequate tonight.

Comments

Britain does not have more troops to send - it has only 25000 front-line Infantrymen and rotation means this is insufficient.

Using Artillerymen long-term as Infantry calls into question the Royal Artillery itself.

95.000 soldiers in an Army is hardly a major force when you consider we once had 26.000 soldiers in Northern Ireland plus 30-40.000 in Germany. A Firemen Strike and an upsurge of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and the British Army would break apart

If our soldiers were better paid, had better living conditions and had more generous benefits and career prospects when the leave the army then we would be able to recruit more people to join our armed forces.

Labour, of course, would prefer us not to have a military at all - or so it seems.

For those of us who grew up in the immediate post war period, we had some sort of contact with the armed forces. Due to two world wars followed by national service, we all had relatives who had either served or who were serving. That situation no longer exists, knowledge of service life is diminishing. Young people will become less and less willing to accept the disruption and restrictions of service life. The armed forces will need to totally rethink much of what it does, and how it does it, over the next few years, if it wants to attract young people into its ranks. Even improving pay and conditions will not be enough!

Steyn talks about 'will' a lot in America Alone, but the irony is that the neocons lack the will to even propose any of the measures that might actually be effective in countering the Islamist threat to western civilisation. They believe that an arbitrary demonstration of 'will', measured by a willingness to rack up body-bags in Iraq, will somehow achieve victory. It's totally nonsensical.

You need 'will' to win a battle, but you also need 'will' to choose to fight the right battle in the first place. It's like if we'd responded to the invasion of the Falklands by attacking Haiti, because that was more convenient. No matter how glorious our victory in Haiti, the Falklands would still be in Argentine hands.

Would you care to set out the actual figures behing this headline? It smells to me a bit like, 49% are militantly opposed, 50% aren't keen, and 1% (Sid & Ethel Bonkers of Doughty St) are fully in support.

Was it necessary to illustrate this with the battle flags of the CSA? I hope the editor didn't pick that up on some of the dodgy sites that a few of the more frequent contribtors obviously visit regularly :-)

Personally, and its a fine judgement, I think GWB will be right to send more troops. A confident Conservative Party would be saying the same and pressuring the government who seem to wish this issue would all go away.

If 9/11 tought us anything it is that we cannot tolerate the creation of more failed states and is what we'd make Iraq if we cut and run.

I am one of those more inclined to the democrats than the republicans but I think GWB has been a braver, and better, president than many give him credit for. He deserves our support in trying to do what is right.

If we had put all these troops into Afghanistan after 9/11 we may have achieved something and maybe got Bin Laden. We would also have pinned down insurgents there rather than spreading them across the middle east. The whole Iraq thing was contrived and we were told a pack of lies. Whatever we do now is going to be a mess and a lot of people are going to die.

That's a nice thing to point out David when so many of our troops are risking their lives against fearful odds with often completely inadequate equipment. These men have my undying admiration for what they do.
As regards the subject of this thread I sincerely doubt the US will be successful however many men they commit.It seems that the Sunnis and Shia are more fearful of each other than they are of American troops.
The new US commander Petraeus however has an outstanding reputation and took an imaginative approach to peacekeeping on his earlier tours with some success. He will if he is to instill any confidence whatsoever within the Sunni community have to take on and defeat the Shia militias something the coalition have been reluctant to do to date. If they don't the ultimate winner of this war will undoubtedly be Iran.

The Editor thinks that world peace depends upon American military might. I think that’s absolute rubbish.

Using military might to control regions only works while the might is focused on the region. Unless opposition is completely wiped out, there’s no lasting change. As soon as the force moves away, its effect is gone.

Preserving America's reputation is not even part of the reason to succeed in Iraq. In fact I don’t want America believing that force is the right way to exert its will on the world - it was exactly that type of thinking that got us into this situation.

The reason to succeed in Iraq is that, if we don’t, it will descend into an even greater hellhole, probably with Iran becoming the main beneficiary. In the build up to war, we rode roughshod over the UN. It’s now time to pay the price. We have to prostrate ourselves before the UN and ask for its help. In turn, the UN has to justify its existence and provide the troops required. The UN is the only force that has a chance of stabilising the area and rooting out insurgents while not creating ten times more to take their place.

I have to praise both Bush and unusually for me (!) Cameron for backing this policy.

I would also like to pick up on the point of European / UN solutions being so much better. The UN did not do a great job in Rwanda, and if I recall Europe has required massive amounts of US armed forces to sort out problems in Europe. Like WW1, WW2, oh, and the Cold War.

If Cameron can move back towards the normal conservative ground of pro-US, pro-UK, pro-military, just at the moment Brown and Co., are barking up the anti-war chattering classes tree, we could actually have a sound policy.

Other than put an end to two of the greatest threats of the last century, I'll accept that the US has done little since to improve its image as an effective tool for peace. It is, however, breathtaking that people continue to believe in alternatives such as this...

The UN is the only force that has a chance of stabilising the area and rooting out insurgents while not creating ten times more to take their place.

And what part of the UN's peace-keeping track record led you to that conclusion?

Steyn again: "The "international community" has reacted in the usual ways: calls for immediate cease-fires so that an ineffectual U.N. force of peacekeepers can go in and enjoy their customary child sex with the locals while propping up the Islamists"

I would also like to pick up on the point of European / UN solutions being so much better. The UN did not do a great job in Rwanda, and if I recall Europe has required massive amounts of US armed forces to sort out problems in Europe. Like WW1, WW2, oh, and the Cold War.

Indeed, people talk about the UN as if it is a body entirely seperate from US military and economic power. The fact that the US accounts for 70% of NATO defense should say something about the ability of Europe(let alone the rest of the world) to employ any kind of power with the same reach that the US can provide.

Its quite one thing for Ian to proudly parade his anti-americanism and factual inaccuracies, but when the lesser "calibre of persons" that make up the US army are responsible for protecting his existence, it's really quite saddening to see such jingoistic nonsense.

"Our soldiers are not only better trained and better paid. They are altogether a better calibre of person than the type that ends up in the US army."

This might have been true in 1975, and it's a view still popular amongst left-wing US intelligentsia as well as anti-American Europeans, but it's not actually true. The US army since 1980 has strict recruiting standards, albeit degraded somewhat since 2004 thanks to Bush's Iraq war. The average US army recruit's IQ is around 105, significantly higher than the national average (ca 100). They need a high school diploma, not as easy as it sounds. I don't know if the UK military records recruit IQ but I doubt it's much if anything over 100.
Most US recruits are from upper-working-class backgrounds, not the urban underclass.

The big strength of the British military lies in its excellent officer class and training systems. The faults of the modern US military lie mainly in training & ethos, not personnel quality.

Ian:
"And for his information the Confederacy may have failed against overwhelming odds but it's armies showed a good deal more courage than their opponents."

Technically true, but just because one side fights better than the other on an individual basis doesn't mean the other side were cowards or fought badly. The soldiers of the CSA fought with almost superhuman bravery, but the soldiers of the USA fought bravely too; being more numerous and better supported, they eventually prevailed, but if they weren't good fighters they would have lost.

I recall reading an enormous technical number-crunching survey which showed pretty definitively that WW2 German soldiers were about 20% superior to British & American soldiers in fighting ability, once all the other variables (air support, artillery etc) were accounted for. This kind of thing drives some Americans (and possibly British) nuts - "Our boys aren't inferior! We're the best in the world!" - Really though, the important thing is that British, American and German WW2 soldiers were all tough, brave and dedicated. The contrast with soldiery lacking those qualities, such as WW2 Italians, is far greater than the relatively small differences between the fighting spirits of the warrior nations.

And what part of the UN's peace-keeping track record led you to that conclusion?

For better or worse, it is the UN that has the authority to act as the world's policeman.

Militarily the USA is undoubtedly more capable, but every American intervention creates more enemies than it destroys. This is the fundamental flaw in American foreign policy, and the point you seem to be missing.

If our soldiers were better paid, had better living conditions and had more generous benefits and career prospects when the leave the army then we would be able to recruit more people to join our armed forces.

Labour, of course, would prefer us not to have a military at all - or so it seems.
The main problem is that so many military jobs have been shed over the past 27 years, there are plenty of ex-army people who have been told they weren't needed anymore.

I rather got the impression that certainly the frontbenches of both major parties felt there wasn't really much need for a standing army, Michael Portillo as Defence Secretary sold a lot of the accomodation for military families. Whether the Major Administration would have gone on with real terms cuts in Defence Spending if they had somehow been re-elected in 1997 we will never know, quite possibly it was in John Major's mind to cutback Defence Spending as a proportion of GDP to the 1% or so similar to that of a number of Continental European Countries (He and Mrs Thatcher wanted the money to carry out tax cuts while easing pressures on social spending, Labour want it as a means of funding increases in social spending), the real terms cuts have stopped in the last few years having slowed since the mid 1990's but now the UK could do with doubling it's Defence and perhaps increasing the size of the army, expanding the Navy, vastly expanding the size of the nuclear strikeforce - the UK needs the capability to be able to extinguish all life and destroy all infrastructure (civilian and military) in any other country in the world - there could do with being a range of delivery methods rather than merely nuclear submarine, there need to be more warheads with more on standby and development on new missile systems and new explosives technology such as the Hafnium Device (which the Pentagon is now working on) which could be used in place of nuclear weapons and in conventional operations.

For better or worse, it is the UN that has the authority to act as the world's policeman.
The UN has no military forces of even guarantee of use of them, the closest is NATO which is technically a UN body.

I think there are arguments for the UN to have a small permanent force so they can act in some situations without having to appeal to UN member states - maybe 10,000 troops, some tanks and armoured personnel vehicles and some artillery and helicopters - enough for them to be able to work with other groups locally.

So far as Iraq and Afghanistan goes insufficent troops were committed from the start, ultimately I think the Taliban in Afghanistan have too much support among Pashtuns to be destroyed militarily and that at some point Coalition Forces will decide to give up there, destroying Al Qaeda is the most important thing, if the Taliban accept to not permit groups that spread revolution about the world as Al Qaeda did then I don't think that anything more could be achieved by troops remaining there, Afghanistan under the Taliban was actually more tolerant of other religious groups than most other states in the area - during the time of the Taliban they maintained good relations with the Jewish Synagogue in Kabul who were in no way infringed in practising their faith - something which cannot be said of Saudi Arabia for example.

The Ba'athists on the other hand always had a much narrower powerbase based in a relatively small part of the country - the Iraqi government can be strengthened to the point that the Ba'athists cannot defeat them, or the country could be partitioned into 3 states.

For better or worse, it is the UN that has the authority to act as the world's policeman.

What authority? A moral one? How is that established? Certainly the Iraqis would reject such authority entirely, which is unsurprising if we consider just what the UN has done for them. Bearing in mind some of the lunatics currently blowing themselves up in all corners of the world reject every inch of Western civilisation, I hardly think they are going to put down their arms for one of its most ineffecutal creations.

I take it then that you believe large supra-national institutions(the UN, the EU perhaps?) trump the rights of individual nation states despite the former having no track record to speak of other than systematic child abuse, oil for food scandals and mass murder. I'm interested to hear the "Conservative" argument behind that conclusion if it is indeed one you hold.

Militarily the USA is undoubtedly more capable, but every American intervention creates more enemies than it destroys. This is the fundamental flaw in American foreign policy, and the point you seem to be missing.

Well if we're going to talk about creating enemies lets put our hands up and recognise our rather large part in creating the cesspit that currently exists across large parts of the Third World. I think it would be intellectually negligent to blame some of the world's current geopolitical hotspots solely on US intervention. Or do you honestly believe the Iraq War is what, for example, motivates the rising numbers embracing radical Wahhabism?

You're right in the sense that doing nothing(I think its called maintaining stability these days) may indeed appear to reduce the number of freedom hating fanatics from threatening our interests but then this would only hold water in a static world which ceased to exist once the BBC cameras had pulled out.

Is it possible that doing nothing at all in the hope that all these nasty people would go away, is actually an invitation to step up the offensive against us? Modern European history would suggest so. Great for your poll numbers, not so hot as a long term security strategy.

Everyone talks of the UN as if it refelect Europan or US values why not consider or a minute that it could well start to reflect Chinese and Russian values around the world............they are after all 40% Security Council

I take it then that you believe large supra-national institutions(the UN, the EU perhaps?) trump the rights of individual nation states

The rights of Iraq as an individual nation state seem to have been pretty conclusively trumped. It would have been better for them to be trumped by a global organisation of 192 member states.

Is it possible that doing nothing at all in the hope that all these nasty people would go away, is actually an invitation to step up the offensive against us?

There is a vicious circle of mutual fear and aggression between Islaamic peoples and the West. That circle has to be broken and, since we had a large part in creating the cesspit, it’s up to us to take a more responsible position.

I do not believe that the military response to 9/11 has either saved Western lives or lessened the danger we face. It’s impossible to say how events would have worked out with a more measured response, but I believe we’d be in a stronger position now. The military response has cost the lives of thousands of coalition soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians, caused untold hardship in two countries, cost a fortune, probably given Iran greater resolve to obtain nuclear weapons, recruited enemies, exposed our military weaknesses, and for what gain? A black hole that we have no prospect of leaving any time soon.

American interests are American interests, which do not often coincide with the best interests of the UK or EU or the Rest of the World.
It wasn't in the Yank's interests when we committed to Suez, it wasn't in their interests to continue Lease-Lend or Marshall Aid unless we committed to de-colonisation.
Even the Falklands were not in their best interests, though we recieved some assistance.
Mark Steyn fails to recognise the reality: The US does not run, it makes a strategic withdrawl having divested its interests and made a decision to invest its interests elsewhere. Vietnam was an ignominious defeat which has scarred its thinking even now.
Sending a further 20,000 troops to Iraq will not necessarily stabliise the country. Iraq is in the middle of a civil war, centred around religious and tribal differences, and it is up to the people to find the will to stop the killings, bombings and sectarian strife.
An outside force cannot impose peace if their is no will, particularly if that outside force is seen as unpopular, bullying and a cause of the problems in the first place. More troops is the band-aid on a slash to an artery, temporary, if not fleeting and a total waste of effort,unless you apply the tourniquet.

I do not believe that the military response to 9/11 has either saved Western lives or lessened the danger we face. It’s impossible to say how events would have worked out with a more measured response, but I believe we’d be in a stronger position now. The military response has cost the lives of thousands of coalition soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians, caused untold hardship in two countries, cost a fortune, probably given Iran greater resolve to obtain nuclear weapons, recruited enemies, exposed our military weaknesses, and for what gain? A black hole that we have no prospect of leaving any time soon.

So I guess the question is: what would the UN's "measured response" have improved upon?

And why you actually believe that any response was in fact necessary since your argument appears to be that there was comparatively little hardship, Iranian threat or enemy resolve prior to our intervention.

Are you thus arguing for more UN backed containment? Containment which, of course, also came at a price in every sense.

Good post George Hinton. The US were wrong not to have helped us to win our spat with Nasser.Both they and the Israelis would have benefitted hugely. Eisenhower and in particular that moron Dulles were too stupid to see it.
The interests of the US and Britain do not always coincide. Churchill,Thatcher and even Wilson realised that, Blair doesn't. It's probably very uncharitable but I can't help thinking that he's more motivated by dollars on the lecture circuit than his nations interest.

Mark Steyn fails to recognise the reality: The US does not run, it makes a strategic withdrawl having divested its interests and made a decision to invest its interests elsewhere. Vietnam was an ignominious defeat which has scarred its thinking even now.

Steyn does recognise the fact that choosing to "divest" ones interest in such a crucial ideological battle is tantamount to long drawn out suicide, not necessarily for the US but certainly for the larger part of the West. We can interpret this as a lack of will on the part of politicians because they incorrectly(in his opinion) determine the interest in staying the course and the price that withdrawing ultimately entails.

At what point did divesting an interest in the future of Vietnam become "an ignominious defeat which has scarred its thinking even now"?

Iraq is in the middle of a civil war, centred around religious and tribal differences, and it is up to the people to find the will to stop the killings, bombings and sectarian strife.
It isn't a Civil War, there is very little going on in the North, in the South there is the odd bit but not much although there are divisions between the Central Iraqi Government and Local Government in the South. The major bombings and guerilla attacks are in the Central bit, the biggest threat to the peace in the North is not Civil War but tensions between Kurds and Turkey, Syria and Iran.

The way the Ottoman Turkish Empire broke up and Turkey was allowed to veto decision making in the drawing of boundaries is the main problem - the Kurds were denied their own state resulting in decades of strife inside Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria and the UK was favourable towards a overwhelmingly Sunni administration in the years that Iraq was developing.

No, my first point is that military intervention in Iraq was bad foreign policy. In disagreement with Tim's editorial, I want that lesson to be learned.

So if there wasnt comparitively less "hardship, Iranian threat or enemy resolve prior to our intervention", then how can you cite such factors as arguments against the intervention? How can, for example, Iran be more resolved to build nuclear weapons with a democratic, Shia-friendly state next door than a Shia torturing nutcase? Is it possible that US intervention is a headache for bleeding-heart Western armchair pundits, Middle Eastern dictators and Wahhabi terrorists, and not the majority of the Middle East who intepret "UN peace" and "stability" as just more theocratic totalitarianism.

My second point is that, taking the situation as it is, the UK and USA are part of the problem. The only solution that has even a slight chance of working is a UN peace force.

Which you havent actually justified. On what basis would a UN peace force actually work, given that the USA and the UK would make up around 75% of such an operation? Do bear in mind that the majority of Iraqis hold the UN in less regard than they do the US, notably those now in power. For very obvious reasons.

Cowboy, yes, I do think that there was comparitively less "hardship, Iranian threat or enemy resolve prior to our intervention"

On what basis would a UN peace force actually work, given that the USA and the UK would make up around 75% of such an operation?

On the basis that it would have a mandate approved by 192 nations. For any chance of success, it must be clear to ordinary Iraqis (not those in power) and their neighbours that the troops on their doorstep represent reasonable global interests, not western imperialists. As TomTom points out, 40% of the UN vote is far from western.

Do you agree with the editor that America’s military reputation secures world peace and therefore America must make a sufficiently large final heave to win the war and preserve its reputation?

Cowboy, yes, I do think that there was comparitively less "hardship, Iranian threat or enemy resolve prior to our intervention"

So you would prefer to see Saddam still in power and UN sanctions still in place, with an expensive, ongoing containment effort being led by US and UK forces.

On the basis that it would have a mandate approved by 192 nations. For any chance of success, it must be clear to ordinary Iraqis (not those in power) and their neighbours that the troops on their doorstep represent reasonable global interests, not western imperialists.

Again, there is no basis to this argument other than it eases your own conscience. The Iranian threat, Iraqi hardship and long term cost would be almost identical since any effective UN force would largely ressemble the multinational forces already in Iraq. The people blowing innocent Iraqis up have no more respect for UN mandates than they do for US backed democratic constitutional Iraqi governments, yet because every Arab league and third world tin pot dictator backs a ineffective peacekeeping force(to further their own existence), you consider this a legitimate foreign policy. This is precisely what Steyn refers to when he talks about September 10th thinking.

Do you agree with the editor that America’s military reputation secures world peace and therefore America must make a sufficiently large final heave to win the war and preserve its reputation?

I agree with Steyn that the real challenges are largely ideological and, consequently, perception is all important. When the West is in uproar over talk of Koran flushing, you can generally bet against it having any of the will necessary to meet the challenges we face in a place like the Middle East.

To reassure incoming inmates that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Qurans are hung from the walls in pristine surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of the United States government to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry.

Most of the advocates of a surge think that at least 30,000 troops and probably 50,000 extra soldiers are needed to execute the clear-and-control operations that are necessary to bring order to Baghdad and hunt down the insurgents that operate from the Anbar province. Well said Tim.

Personally, I think we were wrong to engage in Iraq on the basis of Blair's lies to Parliament and the British people. However, our British troops are there, with all the disadvantages that have been listed in other threads. The UK cannot provide additional troops, and indeed I share the views of the Chief of the General Staff (past and present) that our presence in Iraq is heightening the problem, not solving it.

If this situation is to be solved militarily, leading (hopefully) to a political solution, the USA needs to include a minimum of 50,000+ well trained troops. To this extent, President George Bush's present policy is inadequate.

The Americans can send in as many troops as they like. I have no faith whatsoever in their ability to achieve anything other than to kill more civilians and fill their own body bags.

Whatever Conservative members may or may not think, it's plain the British people as a whole never wanted any part of the Iraq fiasco. We should give adaquate notice, withdraw, and leave the Americans to their own mess.

The recent lynching of Saddam Hussein leaves a particularly nasty taste in the mouth by showing how wretched and disgusting has been our intervention into tribal warfare and the mass destruction of innocent civilians.

We need to distance ourselves from the Blair/Bush Iraq atrocities as decisively as modern Germans have distanced themselves from Nazi war crimes.

any effective UN force would largely ressemble the multinational forces already in Iraq.

Cowboy, it's political not physical appearance that matters. So far as Iran is concerned, a big difference between US and UN operations in Iraq is that the UN isn't telling Iran that it's next on the list.

Well Mr McCartney I disagree, but then again there are those who cannot see anything through. Life is messy and war is very messy, but it is a test of human endurance which sorts out those who can and those who cannot.

The emotive terminology of "lynching" is funny - Milosevic was "lynched" by being tried for years without result in a court which admits hearsay evidence. By the standards of the Middle East Saddam did well to get a trial, his guilt was clear. Perhaps you ought to reflect on how Saddam's friends dealt with the young Prince Regent in Iraq in 1958...............and no doubt the Invasion of Italy was a failure because Mussolin hanged upside down in a village square with his mistress.

It is tiring to have so much armchair rhetoric. In taking Huertegenwald near Aachen in 1944 over 3 months 55000 US GIs and 12000 German soldiers were killed in action fighting in a forest with artillery and tanks.

Those were American soldiers from places like Kentucky, Arkansas, Idaho coming to change a Government in Germany which most Germans fought to the death to sustain.

There were those in Congress who wanted priority given to America's war in the Pacific, but Roosevelt said Europe first.

But never pretend Americans wanted to die in Europe for Germans who did everything they could to stop them sending children to fight and booby-trapping corpses........but they did not give up or despair - they just pushed on.

If people weren't quite so wet nowadays half the problems that overwhelm this little country would be solved rather than the inadequates in charge floundering in them

Lack of wise tactical decisions and stretched supply lines would make the battle of Hürtgenwald a fiasco for the US army: 33,000 casualties on a 50sq. mile battlefield with no military gain.

In his reassessment of a tragic World War II battle, General Gavin concludes that, for the Germans, holding the Huertgen Forest was phase one of the Battle of the Bulge. For the Americans, trying to occupy the forest was an awful mistake.http://ww2panorama.org/panoramas/huertgen-forest

I disagree - WW2 worked out pretty well for the USA, it was in the USA's national interest to fight and win it. The Vietnam war was an awful mistake; the way it was fought precluded any possibility of victory. The Iraq invasion & occupation is a mistake because it works against both general US interests (eg cheap oil) and the stated aim of GWOT (Global War on Terror). Our actual enemy in the GWOT is the Wahabbism-Muslim Brotherhood-Al Qaeda continuum, which has been strengthened rather than weakened by the Iraq war.

I'm not a left-liberal who thinks all use of force is illegitimate, or who shrinks from seeing the UK's or US's soldiers (most of whom are my Scots-Irish kinsmen) be killed, if the cause is just. But I object to seeing those soldiers killed for no good purpose. If it took 3,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 military or even civilian dead on our side to end the Islamist threat to the survival of western civilisation, that would be a price worth paying. But the Iraq occupation is achieving no such thing.

Sam isn't necessarily quite right in his interpretation of the figures actually. Respondents only had the option to agree with the individual statements. 51% chose to agree with the statement. At least some of the 49% who did not choose to agree with the statement might have been don't knows.

With the old powerful nations of Europe crushed or weakened the USA became one of only two superpowers (anybody recall that old joke about "The big three"? I suppose I had better point out that we were supposed to be the third.

Sheer size and resources made America powerful. Now I have never been in the services but I've got to say that out of the generation of Brits who served with Americans during WW II it was difficult to find any who had a good word for their fighting abilities.

By that token WWI worked out well for the USA - and twice in a generation the British squandered their heritage and assets in the USA.

So I revise my comment - the British are congenitally stupid. Whatever the Victorians bequeathed then imto the 20th Century they squandered in acts of folly and handed themselves over to the United States.

Thanks for the reply, and my apologies for missing the answer late last night. As someone who did not take part in this survey, can I ask, what was the question/statement then that people were responding to?

Mark McCartney:
"out of the generation of Brits who served with Americans during WW II it was difficult to find any who had a good word for their fighting abilities."

Hm, I think allies always tend to look at the weaknesses of their allies and ignore their strengths. British view of US forces is typically that they need too much supplies & support to function, and they are less rugged in defense. Conversely, US view of British forces is typically that they're over-cautious and insufficiently aggressive in attack. These are probably to some extent true as relative statements, but it would be more accurate to say that both militaries have their strengths and weaknesses. Taking eg the Falklands war, the US military could not have done what the British marines & paras did, an unsupported march across the island in freezing weather then, without artillery, attack and defeat the Argentine defenders. Then again the US wouldn't have had to do that because their Marines would have had the resources to make a direct attack on Goose Green, probably with a lot of civilian casualties if the Argentines fought, but with fewer military casualties than we suffered.

Perhaps especially as an American, I'm still utterly perplexed at the editorial decision to illustrate this piece with the flags of the Confederacy (not, BTW, the "battle flag," which is only the one in the center which was also the Confederate naval ensign, nor the "Stars and Bars," which technically only refers to the flag on the right, the first of the CSA's three national flags). There must be hundreds if not thousands of graphics of the US flag accompanied by the slogan "these colors don't run".